The End of the Pier

by Martha Grimes

  Maud shook her head to clear it. Sam had made the names up, she reminded herself. Their names were probably “Kelly” and “Craig” and they lived in the Trump and carried little dogs around. Still . . .

  She could hear the party boat disgorge the newcomers, squeals and yaps just like those little dogs.

  Her head was lolling a bit, but it came up when the patio door over there suddenly must have opened, perhaps from the thrust of the music itself.

  “Brazil.”

  It was an omen.

  So Maud forgot the Trump Tower, but she couldn’t put New York out of her mind. There was Rosie.

  The party boat had pulled away from the dock and moored amongst the other little boats. And to the music of “Brazil,” several of the dots of color had beaded together into what was, yes it was, a line. A conga line. They were snaking all the way to the patio door.

  Here Sam had all along had a niece who lived in New York and he’d never told her. Maud looked across the lake now with narrowed eyes.

  Unless he’d lied.

  PART THREE

  Chad

  ONE

  She was a perfect stranger. Why were they lying here in this handsomely draped four-poster bed, among the coats?

  Two drunken dances out by the pool, each of them holding a tall drink of bullet-proof rum with an exotic flower spearing it, not dancing really, just leaning against each other.

  Bethanne had dropped her French-cut panties the moment they walked into the bedroom, as if she were a guest removing her shoes in deference to Oriental custom. The rest of their clothes were still on their backs.

  Voices of more than a hundred guests ebbed and flowed downstairs in the Bonds’ double living room on one side and double library—no, it must have been a game room and library. Enough people to make you think half of them were mirror images of the other half. He’d never seen such clothes. They should have had a runway. Teeny-tiny sequined skirts; long, loungy velvet trousers. High-cheekboned faces, enameled lips and eyes.

  One of them was here. She could have been twenty, his age; she could have been sixteen—it was impossible to tell about women anymore. He didn’t know her last name.

  “You don’t want to do a line, you don’t want to free-base, you don’t want to smoke, and you don’t want to fuck. Why the hell am I here?” she said.

  “You wanted me to pour you into the bathroom next door. You’re pretty liquid.”

  The bathroom’s proximity to his room was probably why all of the coats were here. God knows, the Bonds had servants and closets enough to collect them downstairs, but the rich apparently just run up to pee in the marble bathroom and then fling their coats through the nearest available door.

  He raised his head slightly to see what covered his stockinged foot. He’d removed his shoes in deference to Ralph Lauren. Silvery fur. Fox fur, maybe. The closest he’d ever got to this stuff was Velda’s Russian mink. Was that sable flung over the deep armchair? He didn’t want to know what that glimmering white one was. This Labor Day weekend was on the warm side, and these women were still dragging around in their weighty furs.

  The girl rolled over, elbow on the pillow, caramel-tanned pointy chin on her palm. She made him think of the crême bruleé on the sideboard of desserts downstairs. Her hair was sun-scorched, long, tendrilly, her dress a metallic sheath of gold that turned russet when the silk moved across her hips.

  She fingered his watch; the Rolex impressed her. She walked the fingers of her sinewy, tennis-playing little hands across his shirt front, asking in her breathless voice, “So what do you want?”

  He’d had three of the rum drinks when he was used to beer and maybe a little grass. She’d taken out her stash of coke, a mirror, and a razor blade as soon as she’d hit the bed, right after she’d discarded the panties. It seemed to be done in one fluid movement, as if the whole thing went together. He told her to put it back, he didn’t want to see the stuff. Oddly enough, she obeyed. Then she extracted a miniature solid-silver flask and took a pull on its contents before she offered it to him as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  He smiled at the gesture; it was somehow endearing. Answering her question, he said, “A thousand dollars.” Chad stared up at the softly glowing ceiling. How’d the Bonds get that lighting effect? Dragged down a few stars, probably.

  “What?” Her tickling fingers stopped.

  “A thousand. A bank error.”

  “So call the fucking bank. Now . . .” Tendrils of hair webbed his face.

  He blew them away. “They made a mistake. It was a check for a hundred my mom paid into my account. The bank got the decimal in the wrong place.”

  A sealskin coat slipped from the bed as she suddenly sat up, crossing her legs. “My god, are we going to talk about money?” “Money” sounded as if it were a bad taste in her mouth. She rolled away from him, held back her gorgeous hair, and took another drink from the flask.

  “Unfortunately, it’s spent.”

  “Like your dick,” she said, recapping the flask. Then she snatched something else out of the metal purse, leaned forward over her crossed legs, and started writing.

  He wouldn’t have thought there was any room in that purse. It must have had a false bottom, a magical gold cube from which she, a magical girl from another world who’d infiltrated the party guests, could call forth all manner of things, balms and anodynes, unicorns and genii.

  But here she was, solid and sexy, writing in a checkbook. “If you’re so fucking indigent, where’d you get that Rolex you’re sporting?”

  She pronounced it “in-di-gent.” Chad smiled over at her where she sat laboriously writing, the tip of her tongue caught between her pearly little teeth. There was something so vulnerable about her that he wanted to pat her shoulder. “Hong Kong.” That was a lie; his father had given him the Rolex.

  “You people without money are so bor-er-ing.” She wrenched three syllables from the word.

  She had to be kidding. She wasn’t. Zip. She chucked the check towards him, tossed the checkbook on the floor, rolled over, and started unbuttoning his shirt. He held the check up and squinted at it in that starry light coming from its hidden source around the ceiling moldings. His other hand trailed after hers, rebuttoning the shirt.

  “We don’t even know each other,” he said. “This is for one thousand dollars.”

  Her hand went to unzip his fly. “Jesus, your pants have little buttons.”

  “I think they’re French. Maybe Italian. Borrowed.”

  Bethanne got her face right down, squinting, fascinated. Then she started trying to fiddle with the little buttons.

  He kept staring at the check. Not even her narrow fingers trying to wrench him free made him hard. He was limp, staring at the check. “Why are you writing me a check for a thousand dollars?”

  Her hand stopped fiddling, started squeezing. “Because you said you owed it or something. You been doing drugs? My god, what’s wrong with you? You want me to strip? You want something special?” Now she was trying to wiggle out of what there was of a dress. “You want to unzip?” She turned her back.

  He didn’t move; he lay there thinking of the thousand he’d have to pay back to the bank before his mom found out.

  It had been nearly three months before the bank had recognized its error and one of the assistant managers called Chad. Mr. Frobish had been very understanding when Chad went in to see him. People were generally understanding of Chad. He might have thrown a switch inside, the way he could turn up the charm voltage.

  Yes, Mr. Frobish understood that Chad had simply assumed his father had paid the money into Chad’s account. Yes, he could allow Chad a certain period of time to see that the bank got it back. Mr. Frobish knew Ned Chadwick was loaded. Yes, two months seemed reasonable enough.

  • • •

  The Bethannes of this world didn’t have bank problems. Bethanne’s mother was a stockbroker. The way she’d said it made Wall Street sound like a regular meeting plac
e for mothers.

  “What’s yours do?” she’d asked, out on the terrace, with no particular interest.

  He’d been silent, his chin against her forehead. “She’s in the restaurant business.”

  “Hmm. Be nice to own one. It’s always so shitty trying to get a decent table.”

  “She doesn’t own it.”

  She hadn’t cared and he hadn’t commented.

  Her pretense of truculence right now didn’t convince him; she was too stoned to bring it off. Unfortunately she was a talker, and she rambled on, ever more sleepily, about how he’d dragged her up here to his room and then—whish (the palms of her hands missed each other)—nothin’. “What’s wrong with you, Chaddie?”

  Chaddie. My god, it was worse than Murray.

  • • •

  Murray was the sort of name he might have expected his father to pick. Murray: not a family name, not a friend’s name, not some old blowhard up in New Hampshire (his father’s home state) who’d sat around in the general store playing checkers and sucking his teeth. Murray was a name you couldn’t do anything with. Murr—what the hell kind of nickname was that? The kids in second and third grade had certainly seen the name’s possibilities. With the appropriate swishes and vocal flutings, they’d called him “Mary.”

  Finally, he’d lied and told them Murray was only a middle name. His real name was Ed. But then friends of his would come around asking for Ed and his mom had to keep telling them they had the wrong house, there was no Ed there. If you’re seven or eight you don’t feel much like arguing with a mom, because you know they’re all probably hiding knives behind their backs, even when they’re standing there framed in the doorway looking perfectly friendly, but denying there’s any Ed in the house.

  • • •

  “I’m glad something’s funny.”

  Chad had nearly forgotten Bethanne was there. “What?”

  “You laughed. Or gargled—I don’t know.” She was sitting up now, her back braced against the headboard, her knees drawn up, forcing the satiny skirt all the way down her thighs. Her eyes were closed and she was smoking grass, holding a pinched butt between her thumb and forefinger.

  Christ, he wondered, what else did she have stowed in that hammered gold cubicle? A water pipe?

  “I was just thinking.”

  “About the money . . .” Deeply she inhaled, drawing the smoke into cavernous lungs. “Whyn’t ya ask Billy? He’s got it up to his eyeballs.”

  “Billy” was what they called him at home. “Zero? At school we call him Zero.”

  Bethanne managed, with much labor, to wrench her head around to stare at him. “Zero? Him? Su’prise he even talks t’ya.” The eyes closed again.

  “He made it up, not us. It’s a pun on his name.”

  She was too stoned to care what Billy Cooper Bond did with his name. Her arm moved dreamily, an underwater movement, to pass him the roach.

  Rather than argue, he took it, hoping that would shut her up. He dragged in on the grass but didn’t inhale. He’d inhaled several hundred times too many already. It was grass and coke that had told him that a thousand dollars on his bank statement was perfectly reasonable. When he handed the toke back to her, Bethanne was asleep, suddenly asleep and snoring, sputtering like a tiny outboard motor trying to engage.

  It was his mother who’d come up with the solution to his name. After the third or fourth kid had been at the door asking for Ed, she’d finally figured it out. But why was Murray telling people his name was Ed?

  He’d been scared but didn’t know why. Maybe it was because disowning his name was like disowning her. Like orphaning himself.

  • • •

  Chad sat up, planted his feet on the floor, and looked down at his shoes. Docksiders didn’t really go with the designer trousers. They’d cost forty-nine dollars, and his mother had sent him the money for them. That was just before he’d called her about the hundred he needed. For books.

  Textbooks are expensive, he’d told her. So was traveling and so was coke, he hadn’t told her.

  “Textbooks? It’s the middle of the semester. What happened to the ones you bought at the beginning? Did they turn?”

  Christ, but he hated when she tried to be funny when he knew his position was arguably weak. “Mo-om.” Tone of disgust. “He’s assigned another one. So’s the French teacher.”

  “You haven’t even used up the French text you bought two months ago. How could you? You don’t go to class.”

  How did she know that? She was guessing. Educated guess, since he’d left his midterm grades lying around the house.

  “I go, I go. There was just that time I was sick. Look, I’ve got to have it by Friday.”

  “Friday? That’s two days from now, Chad.”

  “Well, can’t you messenger it?”

  “What was that?”

  Oh, shit—now she’d get off on her Hated Words list. His mom loathed words like “enjoy,” “make nice,” and especially the New Verbs (as she called them), such as “finalize”; and now she’d go on . . .

  “I’ve got a nineteen-year-old with an indigent mother who probably spends most of his time in the girls’ dorm and beer-keg parties . . .”

  He knew it, she would go on and on, so he put down the phone to go to get a beer. Came back, picked it up from the sprung sofa:

  “. . . who’s flunking French . . .”

  Put it down again and sighed. Why was it, for a person who was so shy she was zombified around strangers, that she could rattle on and on and on and on, working up whole tapestries of events from single threads, whole scenarios (one of her Hated Words, “scenario”) from casual comments? He picked up the phone—yes, she was still talking. God! the Greyhound would leave Friday with the other guys, and he’d still be here with her talking.

  “. . . nineteen, for lord’s sake, why do you expect to have money messengered?”

  Couldn’t she just say yes or no? He smiled and said, “Okay, okay, just FedEx it.”

  Silence. He grinned. He could usually shut her up this way. Well, she did it to him all the time. And he knew she was on the other end of the phone trying not to laugh.

  “Funny—that’s hysterical . . . Look, why did you wait until today to let me know about this?”

  Because we didn’t get the idea until today, he didn’t tell her.

  Hung up, and felt guilty. He was always feeling guilty about his mother, about the way she worked so hard for so little. And because she made him feel guilty, naturally he got angry. It was much easier to get angry at her than at his father. His father was too distant, a figure in the fog.

  So he hung up and felt guilty. And when you feel guilty you just get stoned again.

  • • •

  His father had left them when he was seven, and Chad had always had this murky sort of fear that his mother would do the same thing.

  She’d been making one of those sour lemon pies that he hated, running the knife around the edge of the crust as she’d thought it over. “If you don’t want to be one of the family . . .” That’s what she was going to say, he was sure.

  “But there’s only two of us!”

  Already, she was leaving and taking the hated pie with her. “If you don’t like my lemon pie . . .”

  But what he feared hadn’t happened. She’d just pinched off the dangling cord of crust and asked why he hadn’t told her his name bothered him so much. If he didn’t like “Murray,” well, maybe he could be “Chad.” He tried it out a few times, repeated it over and over. It was a great name. Especially because it was his name, or part of his last name. Why hadn’t he thought of it?

  Then he wondered why she had. Did she want someone else for her son that she could so easily throw away his name?

  He told her he hated that sour pie.

  • • •

  Chad sat up, planted his feet on the floor, and looked down at his shoes. His mother had sent him the money to buy them plus another check to his account when he’d neede
d more books.

  That was the hundred that the bank had magically turned into a thousand. He tried to remember how he had managed, even with the help of a little coke, which is where most of it had gone, how he had managed to convince himself, how his mind had been so fucked up he really could convince himself his mother had sent a thousand bucks. His mom didn’t have a thousand bucks. He had reasoned it this way: when he’d told her there was this big emergency (had he told her that?), she’d called his dad and somehow got the money from him. Talk about fucked—Jesus Christ, as if she’d ever call his dad for that . . .

  Bethanne was right; Zero was swimming in money. His father was probably betting a thou downstairs at his private poker game, tossing ten bills into the kitty. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask Zero. He wasn’t sure why. Self-respect, he supposed.

  His only consolation lay in the money he’d managed to make this summer, doing house painting in Hebrides and Meridian. But he’d only managed to earn half of the money that way. If he hadn’t had to put out some of his earnings for a room in Meridian, he could have saved more; but there was no way he could commute the distance to La Porte without a car—or even with, for that matter. Still, he’d managed to send Mr. Frobish five hundred and twenty-five dollars and beg him for another couple of months’ grace. But where he was going to get the rest in a couple of months, he didn’t know.

  He got off the bed and went over to look down into the dark, the moon in the pool as if it had fallen there. The pool would be covered over soon and littered with leaves after the Bonds went back to Manhattan. Strange how they simply stopped living here in this mansion and started living there in some penthouse, as if their lives were cut in half.